As if torn from the pages of “Romeo & Juliet,” the trouble began with their families. A pair of young lovers (a 28-year-old woman we’ll call “Margaret” and a 25-year-old farmhand we’ll call “August”), who, between December 1917 and November 1918, exchanged dozens of love letters amid their against-all-odds romance.
The reason for their hardship? Margaret’s mother, who despised August and seemed committed to derailing the star-crossed lovers’ lives. The letters imply that Margaret’s mother had a hand in what happened next: Margaret’s marriage to a successful farmer 12 years her senior, a man we’ll call “Olaf,” which is where the letters begin.
“I must write you a few lines today to let you know how it is ...” Margaret wrote August on Dec. 19, 1917. “I am going away tomorrow ... I will be married ... Saturday ... I hope the days will be brighter for us. Don’t write to me anymore until I write to you. It is safer.”
I anxiously reach for the next letter, dated Dec. 21.
“I am now awaiting the bridegroom, but I don’t act it ... I hope you will always think a lot of your little friend. She is sitting here crying her eyes out for you now ... I expect to be married tomorrow ... But we had a nice time Tuesday did we not?”
Fully absorbed in the century-old soap opera, I continue to the next envelope, where the young lovers’ fate is revealed.
A wedding announcement for Margaret and Olaf.
Sighing, I remove myself from the pile of letters on my desk. Clearly, I am too invested in the saga. And my investment has spurred my imagination, conjuring scenes of Margaret and August’s seemingly bright — if short-lived — love affair. Certainly, August was no Romeo beneath Juliet’s balcony, but might the pair have professed their love by more Midwestern means? Did they slip from their homes on summer nights to stroll alongside the river not too terribly far from Eau Claire? Did they hide in the shadows of the Holsteins on the farm where August worked?
All I know of their love I could fit on a postage stamp. And its postage stamps that have preserved their story. I’ve come into possession of these letters thanks to a Leader-Telegram reader who, while looking through her late father’s stamp collection, turned her attention to the letters within the weathered envelopes. The stamps turned out to be worthless, but the love story depicted within the letters was priceless. The woman reached out to me.
“Perhaps you’ll know what to do with them?” the woman said.
What does one do with such letters? They were surely not intended for public consumption, which is why I’ve withheld all identifying information. They are wondrous not only for the story they share but for their contrast to today.
I worry that we of the 21st century have seen our last love letters. The days of quills and ink pots are long behind us, but so too are paper and pen. Today’s young lovers express their yearnings by different means: primarily text messages and emojis. Perhaps this is simply the natural way of things, but I can’t help but think that technology falls short in comparison to a handwritten letter.
Margaret wrote August many letters; over the course of which, the narrative begins to change. Two months into her marriage to Olaf, Margaret appears to have begun to make peace with her circumstances. In Olaf, she tells August, she has found the “love of a good man.” Her in-laws had been kind and warm, and her past “has not been questioned ...”
“[Olaf] wanted me in spite of everything,” Margaret writes. “[N]ow I have to keep on living and smiling and pretending to be happy.”
I should have left the story where the letters ran out, but I didn’t.
Instead, I turned to the internet, which offered little in the way of details between their letter-writing days and their deaths. But it did confirm that Margaret and August were never married to one another. And that today, they are buried thousands of miles apart.
What remains a mystery is the 40-year period between their letters and their deaths. What, I wonder, happened then?
What I still don’t know — what I’ll never know — is if their story is a triumph or a tragedy. Do we celebrate the love that was briefly theirs or lament that it was snuffed out too soon? Was Tennyson right? Is it really “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”? Or does a love like theirs cast a shadow over all that comes after?
We don’t always get to pick our preferred endings to other people’s stories, and we can never fully know their stories anyway. Is it wrong to fall in love with somebody else’s love letters? Or to root for a happily ever after that was never meant to be?
As I refold the letters into their envelopes, I am reminded that, once, Margaret and August held these letters, too.
You can’t hold a text message or an emoji.
Love lasts longer with a paper trail.
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